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Cancer Medicine Quackery

ASCO’s new guidelines promote quackery for cancer pain

Recently, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the Society for Integrative Oncology published guidelines for treating cancer pain. These guidelines endorsed quackery like reflexology and acupuncture. The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace in oncology.

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Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Acupuncture does not work for chronic pain

A newly published systematic review of systematic reviews tells us what we’ve known. Acupuncture doesn’t work for chronic pain.

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Quackery

Trojan horse: Selling “integrative oncology” as science-based

Integrative oncology “integrates” quackery with oncology. Its practitioners, however, frequently delude themselves that their specialty is science-based. A recent review article by two integrative oncologists from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center expresses that delusion perfectly.

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Naturopathy Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Quackademic medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

The Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) doesn’t like me much. I understand. I haven’t exactly been supportive of the group’s mission or activities. So it wasn’t surprising that SIO wrote letters trying to rebut a Perspectives article on “integrative oncology” that I published in Nature Reviews Cancer two years ago. What depressed me about that […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

Selling an alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial as an “N-of-1” trial: Integrative medicine’s new propaganda technique?

If there’s one thing that proponents of “integrative medicine” (or, as it’s been called in the past, “complementary and alternative medicine,” or CAM) take great pains to emphasize whenever defending their integration of prescientific and pseudoscientific medicine into medicine, it’s that they do not recommend using “alternative medicine” instead of real medicine but in addition […]